So lets get down to it. Why not just say moms are making their kids fat and lazy? And when we are looking 20 years down the road and all these kids are obese and hanging out in mom’s basement playing video games, or doing drugs, we can blame it on her again.
I know of plenty of kids who eat too much junk food and watch too much TV and their mom’s don’t work. How about doing that study? How about studying how no matter what moms do their kids are being programmed to want junk food by marketing companies that see obesity as dollars in their pockets? And how every time kids turn on the TV to watch yet another show with emaciated teen-age girls who are made up to look like Pamela Anderson, they are bombarded with food commercials like Pizza Pops and fried chicken? How about doing the study about how the government is not helping mom’s to stay at home with their kids, if they want to, or making quality after school care affordable, or implementing healthy eating initiatives in the schools? How about doing a study on the levels of sugar, fat and salt that have crept their way into the food products we all eat? (Actually I think those studies have been done, but I regress to drama when I am upset)
I grew up in a house with a working mom. I can tell you that I watched very minimal TV and I ate apples and crackers for snacks. There was no pop and there were no bags of chips found in our home. We also did not have Hanna Montana and the Gossip Girls. I walked myself to and from school, as did my siblings. Having a working mom taught me independence and taught me that being a woman is never a good excuse for not accomplishing things in life. It was not all rosy either, but problems are problems regardless of whether a mother works or not.
My parents made a choice every time they went to the grocery store about what food would be available to us for snacks. They made the choice to put the TV in a very small sitting room with only enough room for two people to watch at any given time. They made the choice to not put TV’s in our bedrooms. These are choices based on their priorities as parents. These choices had nothing to do with my mother working. It comes down to family priorities. If health is a priority then mom, AND DAD, will make conscientious choices about the activity levels and foods that their kids eat.
Can we please stop blaming moms for everything? How about supporting women in the work place, and at home, to be the best they can be, rather then grinding them into the ground with studies that blame.
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6 comments:
that is totally true but I think you misunderstand the nature of studies. The researcher doesn't start the study saying "working moms make kids fat and lazy, lets go do a study" the researcher either studied fat lazy kids and found that one of the statistical models showed a correlation to working moms or studied working moms and found a correlation to fat, lazy kids.
With out studies like this, how would we determine that families with working moms needed more support? How could we show that the lack of support lead to poor outcomes? The media's choices to run the story or slant the story are one thing but the researcher came to those conclusions using math, not judgment.
The frustration in your post is so true however. You can't blame moms for working. In a reality where 2 parents work, other things must exist to prevent fat, lazy kid outcomes. Ensuring those 'things' exist is the responsibility of us all.
Well, I think you are partially correct that I have misunderstood the nature of the study, a misunderstanding due to poor reporting. What I do understand is that studies in Canada are performed off of grants given by the government. So some research facility decided to do a study that targets working women using our tax dollars. Or maybe the study was about children and their habits. How am I to know? It was not reported. It does not take a genius to realise that you can't do a study about children that excludes the parental influence. Families can choose to eat grilled chicken rather then fried chicken, regardless of whether mom works. Which goes back to my original point. This study specifically targeted working mothers. Not a blanket study about children in general. A study done on children's eating habits is a valid study. A study done on children of working mothers is not a valid study because it is biased.
This study comes to light at the same time that we are told the government has cut funding to services for children suffering from developmental disabilities, the very organizations that assisted us when we moved back to BC with Matthew. And massive cuts have been made to our educational system. So while we can afford to give grants for bull shit studies we can't afford to continue valuable services that help families?? Our society as a whole has a problem if this is the case.
For some reason our western society has a bias against working women. There are women working in developing countries all over the world who don't have the luxury of feeling guilty when they leave their homes to hit the sweat shop for a 16 hour shift to make $.60 a day. Or women who leave their children with grandma only to kidnapped and sold into the sex trade in Eastern Europe.
It never occurred to most of the women of the world that they had a choice to even have children. So why is it we are so unequipped to deal with women who have children and work. The fact that we are still discussing it and it comes up in a study in 2009 astounds me.
So realising that I did not give enough credit to our news provider I sent the following off to Global:
Sometime this week Kevin Newman ran a small clip about a study that was done concerning working women and children’s unhealthy habits. I have looked thru the video footage and I can not find it.
I would like to see it again to know exactly what was reported. It was so short I can’t be certain that the opinion I have formulated is correct.
I have to say it was disappointing that more information was not give in regards to the study and its purpose. I can’t help but feel that any mother watching that would have been horrified. Because there was such little information given it left me feeling uneasy about the purpose of the report itself. Why bother reporting it if it is not worth elaborating on? And why report something that leaves half the population feeling guilty and blamed. I think working women feel bad enough that they have to go to work with out having to listen to studies that insinuate that the responsibility for healthy habits for children rests squarely on their shoulders.
Buffy Ramm
Oh! And thanks for your lovely comments Will! And for reading my blog! I totally appreciate it!
You are totally right in your anger buff - but I have to say it's likely not the researcher's fault. Judging by the last few of our published studies have been dealt with by the media (and this is media we sent our own press releases to, not hostile!) it's pretty evident that the time constraints and 24-hr news cycle seem to pressure newswriters and readers to interpret science wildly and often report harsh judgments that no scientist would dare to attach to their work.
Will's right in that it's very likely that the scientists did a study on activity and eating habits in young people (there is a research group who is right beside me in my office who do this) and their data reaveled this association. I can't seem to get ahold of the article itself so I don't know how strong the association is. There could be confounding issues, such as - maybe families with two parents who work are themselves more overweight anyway?
ultimately what needs to be done is exactly as you say so well - children need to be protected from the types of messages they see every day, and exposure to processed foods rich in salt, sugar and fat. Regardless of whether parents work, our society isn't doing a great job of creating a healthy environment for children to grow up in, and in fact our lax rules allow corporate interests to unduly influence them.
That doesn't mean we need to shut down research though - it's exactly because researchers have the freedom and protection to seek publication of their work, reviewed by peers, that we have a system whereby the public can learn more about themselves, their lives, and where our research dollars go. I think we need to teach the media how to not sensationalize every little thing, and of course, to get rid of this mom blaming thing.
So I read the articles posted on Global National's website, and the study was published in the latest edition of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, which is a fairly good journal. (this means that most of the time, people tend to trust that smart, independent scientists review all of the articles submitted and only the ones with proper science, good methodology, and appropriate conclusions based on evidence get published. The reality is that this occasionally gets warped by even the best journals) - the data was based on a longtitudinal cohort study called the UK Millenium Cohort Study (will I think this is the study that the UK show you guys watch, about raising children in britain, is based on). You can read more about the study here.
The way this study worked (which I noted was only sparsely covered in the media, and given that most of the public doesn't understand how population research is done, it doesn't surprise me that the media gets away with mom-blaming) is like this:
Because longtitudinal (over a long period of time) studies have some of the best, most reliable data we can get as population scientists, Usually they survey large amounts of people, are well funded and involve HUGE amounts of data (in comparison, the study I work on has more than 3700 participants with 175 variables (survey questions), and has generated more data than we can deal with in a decade. And that's just on maternity care.) Studies like this are funded and initiated by governments because they give vital information to help health planning. Without it we would never have discovered the shocking increase in Autism diagnoses in north america or learned that women are disproportionately underdiagnosed with heart disease.
So, funded by the UK gov't, researchers at a UK university looked at every birth in the UK from Sept 2000 to August 2001 (a bit later in Scotland). They used mathematical power calculations to determine how many subjects they needed, and in which demographic and geographic classes they needed, and contacted households randomly, inviting the amount of families to participate that was indicated by the power calculations. This sample has 18,818 babies in it, and the research team has done 3 "sweeps" or data collections of the same group or cohort of families. They invite the families at the outset of the survey to participate (usually it involves a small honorarium), and follow up with them every year to ensure they stay in the study. At three different times (2001, 2003, 2007), they approached the families in the cohort and asked the moms & dads (if there were dads), to fill out surveys.
The data in this study (MCS3) was gathered from the 2007 sweep, when the children were entering primary school. Just to put your mind at ease, obesity and parental employment wasn't even a hypothesis. Have a look at the survey they used.
The point of studies like this is not to target one issue, because it's too expensive. When you gather population data on almost 19,000 families, you ask everything under the sun - everything you can reasonably justify asking or fit into a 4-hour interview. This is the type of data that is used like our national census: it sits around in HUGE datasets, and is guarded and protected so that researchers can access it and use it to compare to other studies, or gain background data for other studies, or plan health interventions. the value of studies like this is immeasurable, and every family in the UK will benefit from it.
Thanks for coming thru with that information Jocelyn. So am I to understand that our media people chose to comment on a study done in Britain, where meat pies and fried fish are menu staples, and picked out the parts about working moms to report on??? Shame! Pretty poor...
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